“Church is not a place where we go to profess our virtue, but one where we go to confess our lack of it.”

Yet if the church is an alternative polis, one of its chief characteristics is the striking failure to be a fully realized moral alternative. Because we receive the Gospel from human hands, our human selfishness and limitations—marked by sin and the pain that comes with it—constitute a significant part of our story. I have seen pinprick glimpses of unmitigated glory in the church, but I have also seen ignorance and self-satisfaction, abuse and oppression, selfishness, bullying, manipulation and all manner of viciousness. As a priest in the Anglican Communion, I’ve seen our entire denomination around the world divided over questions of biblical teaching around human sexuality and marriage. As a female priest, I’ve been publicly mocked and privately humiliated by men who not only oppose women’s ordination (a view from Scripture one could reasonably hold) but who are sexist and just plain mean.

Such examples are sometimes used to accuse the church of hypocrisy, but part of our witness as an alternative polis is that we admit we are failures but have received grace and offer forgiveness. Church is not a place where we go to profess our virtue, but one where we go to confess our lack of it. This is a fairly radical idea in our broader culture where, as theologian Martin Marty puts it, “everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven.” For Christians, our very creeds claim that we fail to live up to that which we proclaim. Every week we kneel together in confession, abandoning any hope that we are the righteous ones, the ones on the “right side of history.” The church, says ethicist Gilbert Meilaender, is “first and foremost, a community of forgiven sinners gathered under the cross. Not a community that embodies the practices of perfection or that is simply separate from the world, but a body of believers who still live ‘in the flesh,’ who are still part of the world, suffering the transformations effected by God’s grace on its pilgrim way.”

– “True Story” by Tish Harrison Warren in The Point.  A beautiful apologetic for church. You should read the entire thing.